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Andy Kim and Kevin Drew form a new social scene

There was certainly no calculation involved in Andy Kim’s decision to make a record last year with Kevin Drew. What’s to calculate, after all? A collaborative album by the 62-year-old, expat Canadian — the Brill Building songwriting legend behind such classics as the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” and the 1974 smash “Rock Me Gently” — and one of the founders of Toronto indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene doesn’t automatically announce itself as an opportunity to make millions.

No, Kim’s new album, It’s Decided — due out next Tuesday, via the BSS-affiliated Arts & Crafts label — was a project born purely out of a somewhat unlikely friendship between the two musicians that slowly blossomed after Drew, 38, agreed to play one of Kim’s annual Christmas charity shows in Toronto a few years ago. And it continues to blossom, by all appearances.

To sit down with the pair is to witness first-hand a bona fide mutual-admiration society. Kim and Drew haven’t known each other that long, all things considered, but they’re already almost at the stage of couplehood where they’re finishing each other’s sentences. It’s kind of cute.

“It’s strange that this relationship gave birth to this album,” concedes Kim, a Montreal native who now resides in Los Angeles. “But it was just a natural thing. I listen to it and it’s a beautiful album. I wouldn’t change one lyric, one syllable, one melody line, one EQ line. Nothing. I love this. So I don’t know how we got here. We got here by Kevin saying: ‘OK, we’re gonna go in the studio.’”

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“It was a friendship,” affirms Drew. “We’ve been saying this and it’s really the truth. It was just: ‘How can we hang out? How can we hang out more? Maybe we should make a record.’”

Drew likens the first Broken Social Scene album, 2001’s Feel Good Lost, to “a love story,” it being a document of his then-burgeoning friendship with Brendan Canning. It’s Decided, he says, is very much in the same vein.

He was drawn to Kim initially out of respect for his history and his bottomless pool of fantastic rock ’n’ roll stories, which can at any time casually invoke the likes of John Lennon, Phil Spector and Cher. Soon, though, he grew intrigued by “how much peace he had with the highs and lows of his life,” and found a supportive and genuinely appreciative mentor who would help guide him through the frustration and self-doubt that set in when Broken Social Scene drifted into semi-retirement in 2011.

“I would play him some stuff and his enthusiasm for it — I was kind of caught off guard,” says Drew, who might have unwittingly set the course for It’s Decided when he dropped the album’s lead track, “Sister OK,” in Kim’s inbox one day with a note to “Tell me what you think.”

Kim’s response? “‘Can I take your vocal out and put mine in?’ is what I said. I needed to know: Can I have this? Can I do this?”

And so it went. No plan, just a lot of friendly sessions laid down while Drew was simultaneously recording his 2014 solo album, Darlings, with such members of the extended Social Scene family as Do Make Say Think’s Ohad Benchetrit, the Stills’ Dave Hamelin and Tortoise’s John McEntire lending assistance in the studio.

The two withstood a lot of doubtful “What are you doing?”-type remarks during the process, but the results are pretty impressive: rather like what you might hear if Kim were fronting a reverent and deferential, if still characteristically warm, layered and spacey Broken Social Scene.

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Kim’s 1968 single “Shoot ’Em Up Baby” gets an au courant ambient reworking along the way; there’s a Ron Sexsmith co-write to be found in “Why Can’t I” and Drew even gifted his new BFF with a “lost” BSS track, “Who Came First,” to close out the record. Kim, bless his heart, was “too intimidated” to record the vocal track for the latter while original singer Drew was in the studio.

“I just went with the spirit of love and trust. I didn’t know what we were gonna do,” says Kim. “There was no preconceived concept. My relationship with him was not about music, basically. I respected where he came from. There was no context. There was an immediate: ‘Oh yeah, this is good. This is right. This is ordained. This is decided.’ Us making an album was the last thing I thought our relationship would bring. . .

“It’s the child in me that connected with him. And the adult was cool with it. The child in me said, ‘I’m not gonna go to school today because I’m gonna hang with my friend Kevin.’ And the adult said, ‘You’re good. You’re gonna be happy. It’s good, wherever it takes you.’ So when I look at all of this I don’t feel the structure, I don’t feel the science of it all. I just feel the comfort of knowing that I’m doing something with him, whatever it is.”

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